Design of local parallel pattern processor for image

Several image processing machines have been designed and some of them already implemented. The Illiac III by McCormick,l hexagonal processor GLOPR by Golay,2 and bi, nary image processor BIP by Gray3 are examples. The idea of parallel processing hardware has proved its feasibility, appealing to a number of industrial applications. Special purpose image processors, such as the optical character reader,4 the white blood cell differential count analyzer, 5 the remotely sensed data analyzer6.7•19 and the computer tomography machine8 have their characteristic architectures according to their purpose. General purpose image processors have been proposed by several research groups9-11.18 and are demonstrating their ability. The problem now to be solved is determining what architecture of image processing machines is superior in the cost performance ratio. Trade offs in various aspects like speed, generality and economy, should be discussed. Our approach is a microprogram mabie local parallel pattern processor (PPP) which has several basic image processing functions in a simple hardware. In the second section, major concepts considered for the design of the PPP will be discussed, and in the third section, the details of the implementation of the basic image processing functions are described. Some simple examples of programming the PPP will be shown in the fourth section, but the details of command formats, application softwares for remotely sensed data analysis, medical image processing, etc. can be found in other papers. 1214